Tuesday, February 14, 2012

HHS released their annual report today on their efforts to control Medicare Fraud and the amount they recovered in Fiscal Year Ending 2011. They are reporting a record amount recovered a whopping $4.1 billion dollars. Of course every year is a "recording breaking:" amount.

I'm not so sure this is anything to brag about, I'm leaning toward NOT!

I'm thinking if every year I was returning a record number of cows to the barnyard, I would not qualify for a bonus. I'm just guessing, but I think I would be fired for continually letting a record number escape.

WASHINGTON –Attorney General Eric Holder and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius today released a new report showing that the government’s health care fraud prevention and enforcement efforts recovered nearly $4.1 billion in taxpayer dollars in Fiscal Year (FY) 2011. This is the highest annual amount ever recovered from individuals and companies who attempted to defraud seniors and taxpayers or who sought payments to which they were not entitled.
These findings, released today, in the annual Health Care Fraud and Abuse Control Program (HCFAC) report, are a result of President Obama making the elimination of fraud, waste and abuse a top priority in his administration. The success of this joint Department of Justice and HHS effort would not have been possible without the Health Care Fraud Prevention & Enforcement Action Team (HEAT), created in 2009 to prevent fraud, waste and abuse in the Medicare and Medicaid programs, and to crack down on the fraud perpetrators who are abusing the system and costing American taxpayers billions of dollars. These efforts to reduce fraud will continue to improve with the new tools and resources provided by the Affordable Care Act.
“This report reflects unprecedented successes by the Departments of Justice and Health and Human Services in aggressively preventing and combating health care fraud, safeguarding precious taxpayer dollars and ensuring the strength of our essential health care programs,” said Attorney General Holder. “We can all be proud of what's been achieved in the last fiscal year by the Department’s prosecutors, analysts and investigators – and by our partners at HHS. These efforts reflect a strong, ongoing commitment to fiscal accountability and to helping the American people at a time when budgets are tight.” more here

Today, the Washington Post ran a story about an Inspector General report that showed that from 2006 to 2010, the Office of Personnel Management paid $601 million to retirees who are dead.
Unfortunately, paying people the wrong amount or paying the wrong people – what we call “improper payments” – has been happening in the Federal government for far too long, and it is just plain wrong. It’s why, as faithful readers of OMBlog know, the Obama Administration has moved aggressively against improper payments and wasteful government spending since day one.
President Obama set a goal of preventing $50 billion in improper payments and recapturing $2 billion in erroneous payments. The Administration has taken important steps towards achieving the President’s goals, which have yielded early results.
In 2009, the President ordered agencies to identify programs with the worst records in this area and to select a senior official to be held accountable for coordinating agency program integrity efforts. The Administration set up a public website to track progress on reducing these payment errors and hold leaders accountable and called for action against government contractors for failing to report significant overpayments received on government contracts in a timely way.
In 2010, the President directed that Federal agencies use technology to attack this problem and return billions of erroneous payments to American taxpayers. As the Vice President announced in June 2010, we have expanded the use of cutting-edge fraud mapping tools to gather enormous quantities of information in real time, analyze the data, and connect the dots to identify indicators of possible fraud or error. ...more here